lilly:

Like many of us, I’ve been thinking a lot about Steve Jobs the last few days — thinking about the man and his legacy. I’ve been having some trouble even understanding the way I feel, let alone being able to put it into words. Lots of folks have asked me what I think, and have been surprised that I…

Some great thoughts on the recent events from John Lilly. 

Some great advice to get through your day. 

cameronmoll:

This morning I tweeted about a lack of inspiration and having to trudge through it. In response, @brainhofj tweeted about the following:

This handwritten letter is by Austin Madison, Pixar animator of Rex, the green dinosaur in the Toy Story series (among other characters he’s…

A good quote and great start of an idea from Fred Wilson:

He explained that once your brain starts working on a problem, it doesn’t stop. If you get your mind wrapped around a problem with a fair bit of time left to solve it, the brain will solve the problem subconsciously over time and one day you’ll sit down to do some more work on it and the answer will be right in front of you.

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this article but I came to it again and I definitely believe in this idea of chipping away at a problem. I know there have been times in the past where I’ve either crammed in a problem or design or studying and really felt like maybe it wasn’t the best effort I could have put forth. Or that you end up finding a better solution the day (or week) after. 

It’s one thing that I’m striving to do more often. Even if it’s just taking down thoughts everyday.

Everything is a remix.

Great series based on creativity and the notion of everything is not new, a remix of sorts. Creating something new is a transformation. 

I’m thoroughly enjoying this series and you should check out part 1 and part 2 also.

A beautifully hand made phone wallet from Hard Graft. It’s been added to my wishlist.

Some interesting tidbits I’ve been meaning to post. A couple weeks back I ran into a couple Dribbble posts that were looking at some ways to create the designs with CSS. Being that I was more interested myself to see what the outcomes would be for my own sake, I dove in trying to see if they could be done differently than anyone else had posted. 

Rounded Point Tooltip

The first was this design by Davy Kestens. The key to it was having the rounded point on the left hand side and also creating a seamless gradient from top to bottom also. I quickly threw out this fiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/T4Jg4/6/ which is basically using a rotated square as an :after element with gradients applied:

Seamless Border + Transparency

The second was a bigger task, creating this design by Jeff Broderick into as much CSS possible. Though the animations are there and lots of psuedo :after and :before elements (including the big shadow), I feel the biggest take away from this is the triangle with the continuous border and transparency seen here:

On the left is the photoshop mockup, the right is the in-browser snapshot (Safari 5).

As you can see it’s really close and as a whole, I believe it’s not as noticeable either. You can view the whole CSS in action here: http://grinnbarrett.net/stratus/

It comes with the same premise, a rotated square with gradients applied, but this time to make the border not come behind the transparency of the triangle(and even having the inner glow too), I made a gradient that is the same background gray from 47% to 53%. If you look really close you can recognize it, but for the most part I actually feel like I accomplished something that could be implemented for real designs in the future to stay away from a bloated PNG as a background. I didn’t spend as much time perfecting it, as there are some loose ends to tie up on it along with cross browser compatibility testing (though I tested across Chrome, Safari and Firefox). It still could be useful. Here’s a fiddle to dink around with if you want: http://jsfiddle.net/3arrett/cfdNS/1/